One of my 2015 goals has been to publish on at least five sites that I read, love and where I have never had work. The New Republic fell in all three of these categories so I was excited that the amazing editors there wanted to publish this essay on The Color Purple. However, since its publication I have received some emails from a novelist and poet taking issue with a quote of his I used in the piece — a quote, mind you, that has been in print for almost thirty years. Though at first I was a little stoked by this exchange, (the fact that someone who has done one of those “conversation” events with Toni Morrison as a fellow author would even think to type my email address was flattering), now I am just annoyed. Also, I found this piece difficult to compose and getting through it and being ok with the final draft felt good, like I was beginning to reclaim some of my brain from the miasma that has enveloped it the past few months.

Luckily, I haven’t been depressed postpartum, but my writing process has been a lot more circular. I’ve never been one to burst at the seems with voluminous word counts but now to get 1,500 coherent words I might have to write 4,000 crazy ones. And I hate this. And I’m in the middle of doing it again right now on a piece that I find horrifying to write, well, because it may bring more than an ancient sexist out of the woodwork…

My first published piece since having my baby is, well, about my baby…and fear…and anxiety…and vaccinations. I’m super happy about writing for a new outlet and hope to do more health/science pieces in the future. Check out the link here.

2. My teacher was called Ms. Wiggins and she wore wigs four out of five days.

3. There was only one person in my class I did not like: Tara. Under my breath I referred to her as “Terror.”

In grade school my grandfather always bought me a box of Valentines from the supermarket to give to my entire class. The night before the holiday I sat on the couch, addressed each card, put a rubber band around the envelopes and slipped them in my backpack.

I struggled with whether I should write a card to “Terror.” But for me it wasn’t about whether or not I liked her; everyone knew I hated her and she hated me. By not giving her a card I would have been leaving someone out and even if I didn’t like the person I didn’t want to do that.

After I had written the cards, I continued to hang out on the couch where I read the culture section of the newspaper because that’s where the comics, puzzles and horoscopes were. When I got up to get ready for bed I noticed something between the couch cushions: one of the cards I had written. And it was the one addressed to Tara. I knew in my heart the universe was trying to tell me something. Only I couldn’t discern what. Should I choose to give “Terror” a card twice? Or was this a clear sign that I shouldn’t give her a card at all? Yes, the Valentine had slipped through the cracks. But I had also fished it out. I put it in my backpack with the rest of the cards.

The next day at school Tara had a Valentine for everyone except for me.

Twenty-six years later I don’t know how I would remember this, or if I would remember this at all if I had withheld the card. As a fourth grader, I felt stupid for having given Tara a Valentine, and for the next twenty years or so my takeaway was that the universe had tried to lose the card to spare me the anger I felt at myself. Now, a little bit more mature, I understand that I had my own code, which I struggled with, but maintained. The lesson I see here now is that we all struggle with our values and often, even when we have the right ones, they are not reciprocated and we’re not rewarded for them.

Being a new breastfeeding mom, it’s no surprise that I have been put through my paces as of late. For example:

The first two weeks of breastfeeding so much skin hung off my nipples, or rather just barely held on, I nicknamed them “walkers” as in The Walking Dead.

Bigger breasts made me feel hot alright. Irrespective of how many layers I wore whenever I went outside cold air found my nipples and ignited a five-alarm fire on them.

After my baby has had a particularly intoxicating bout of nursing and his little fat body goes limp and his face slack, I have flashes of what he would look like if he were a junkie nodding on the subway or a wino sprawled out on a park bench.

Talk about not seeing eye to eye. For the week I spent shirtless with my nipples covered in oil, I’m pretty sure my husband forgot that I had a face.

Having always had small breasts I was happy with meant that I never spent a lot of time thinking about my breasts or anyone else’s. Except for the summer before my junior year of high school when I read Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon and John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath back-to-back. In the Morrison, the protagonist Macon “Milkman” Dead receives his nickname because he breastfeeds as a little boy. (Any Morrison reader knows that this motif gets revisited in Beloved.)

The Grapes of Wrath famously concludes with Rose of Sharon breastfeeding an old sick man after she delivers a stillborn. I must have read the last couple paragraphs of that book six or seven times just to make sure what I thought happened happened. I also remember being desperate to talk with someone the night I finished the novel about how flummoxed and freaked out the scene left me. So much so I could put on the backburner for a moment how much I hated that damn Oakie dialect! In any case, here’s a Louie C.K. bit about breasts that beautifully finds its way to Steinbeck.

I know that I am not fat, but my pants told me otherwise the other night. Before bed I pulled a stack from the closet — a couple of corduroys, one pair of jeans and some wool trousers. I couldn’t button one pair of the corduroys at all. I managed the jeans but I doubt I could walk a block without the stressed zipper bursting open. Though I fit the trousers ok I went directly from the mirror back to my closet to stare down a pile of pants I don’t dare try on because they were snug before I got pregnant. During my ritualistic December closet cleanse, I considered getting rid of the “itty-bitties” but decided on a deadline instead. If I can’t fit a pair by Memorial Day, I’ll toss them.

However, during this same closet cleanse I came across a piece of clothing I could never-ever consider parting with. Not because it constitutes a measuring tape for my waistline. Instead, the XL red plaid shirt-jacket that used to belong to my grandfather swells my heart.

The kind of working class garment that became fashionable with grunge and is so again at a moment where beards better characterize hipster masculinity than skinny pants, the collar of this flannel is threadbare though its maroon, quilted lining remains intact. On the back of the left sleeve, starting at the elbow, a trail of black X-shaped stitches act as a bandaid on a patch of the fabric that, worn away, resembles cottony insulation I am more accustomed to seeing in walls than clothes. On the back of the right sleeve, a similar badge of extensive wear exists that my grandfather looped thread around, making a tight ugly tube where I can only assume there was once a ragged, gaping hole.

Part of why this piece of clothing means so much to me is because in my most treasured photograph with my grandfather he is wearing it. Just emerging from the holiday season, which ruthlessly juxtaposes our desire for material objects with our immaterial yearnings to love and be loved, my grandfather’s shirt is a physical manifestation of childhood security. For that reason, I will never let it go.

However, as a new mother I have already donated a set of newborn onesies to the Housing Works bin in my building. Just as the belongings of the dead are precious because they are finite, the belongings of the very young seem cheap because they are infinite. And so as my child grows more creased by the day, his body dismissing garments before they have had a chance to touch his petal soft skin I am reminded that robust, healthy bodies are beautiful gifts. I am grateful to have a body that without incident, complication or medical intervention could carry a baby, deliver a baby and now feed that baby. Yet, as I cling to a piece of clothing that belonged to a dead man at the same time I’m giving away the newborn clothes of my son, I find that for this postpartum woman clothes are literally a matter of life and death.

Last week I had a piece published on The Guardian’s opinion site about “acting white” and Justin Simien’s debut film Dear White People. In that piece, I didn’t come near to saying what I loved about the film, why I thought it was so clever and the statement the movie makes about the continued reign of black face as a source of entertainment for white folks even here and now in the 21st century. Besides the powerful comment Simien makes at the very end of his film — almost offhandedly — about how the corporatization of higher education cannibalizes institutional integrity — the strongest theme for me, which beautifully manifested in the movie’s point of view, posits an antidote for the stereotypes that continue to mire black identity.

The black nerd.

There are countless sites and twitter handles that contain the words “black” and “nerd” — all laying claim to some manifestation of an idiosyncratic, interest-based identity. They include: Black Nerd Power, Black Nerd Problems, Black Nerd Comedy, BlackGirlNerds and the list goes on and on. Specifically, by “interest-based identity” I mean a person’s interests defining them. On the other end of the spectrum, in the context of blackness, exists a degraded sense of a “behavior-based identity” embodied by figures ranging from the “Welfare Queen” to the “gangsta” to the “thug” to of course older stereotypes and motifs like Sambo, Mammy, Jezebel and so forth. Not that there isn’t a black nerd somewhere right now who is reading Tolkien while sipping sizzurp (that’s a Key and Peele skit waiting to happen, btw), but the “behavior-based identity” is characterized by negative things people do whereas the “interest-based identity” can be summed up broadly by a keen absorption of specific areas of the culture.

For example, my dog’s name is Nimoy, yes, after Leonard Nimoy, and I have every intention of naming my son after another beloved canonical figure, though not from the sci-fi universe, let alone a recent century. That’s all to say that this whole black nerd thing is beyond close to my heart; it’s who I am. And I have a feeling it is who the likes of Justin Simien, Shonda Rhimes and President Obama are too, among hordes of others, in our own way…

In his review of Dear White People, A.O. Scott wrote that Simien’s debut plays up the tension between how we all see ourselves — as living, breathing, individual souls and how other people see us: as a caricatures. The “caricatures” Simien employs in his college “satire about being a black face in a white place” represent aspects of the millennial African American experience: the razor-tongued, militant biracial who is torn between being an artist and being a mouthpiece; the square-jawed All-American with daddy issues; the pretty brown-skinned girl who aims to be even prettier armed with a weave and light-colored contacts; and the nerdy, cute, sexual outsider whose disenchantment takes on the shape of an unkempt afro.

Of these characters, the one that the audience most completely understands and sympathizes with is the gay nerd, writer and sci-fi buff, Lionel, played by Tyler James Williams, whose face also appears on the film’s posters and in many of the promotional photos making the rounds. In a dorm full of writers where on paper he should belong, Lionel is the punchline of one homophobic joke after another. Amongst the black kids where you’d think his afro would give him at least a day pass, he just seems awkward. Because Lionel doesn’t belong in this world and neither does the audience, even if some of us have experienced Ivy League posturing, we see how ridiculous and mean these cut-outs impersonating people that Lionel is surrounded by actually are. After all, the audience is not full of cut-outs. We’re actual people, defined by things that we love, not flat identities we give lip service to. Why? Because to be a 3D, likable person is increasingly to define yourself as some type of geek or nerd, period.

In a recent episode of Black-ish, a sitcom about a black family residing in the largely lily white upper-middle class, the father played by Anthony Anderson is mortified to witness that his son doesn’t acknowledge other black kids, especially other black boys, with a head nod at school. At the end of the episode, however, the father realizes that his son does acknowledge “his peeps” with a gesture. Only his peeps are the other nerdy kids wearing normcore glasses and khakis and the semi-pained expression that they have somewhere else to be. Only that place is not first period class; it’s 5-15 years into the future.

I really like Black-ish and I really like Dear White People because both pieces script subjectivity as the primary way the black experience is, well, experienced. More and more, we’re seeing that experience from the nerd’s point of view. And I’m loving every minute of it because it makes the perpetual outsiders feel like insiders for once, for just being ourselves.